


Sometimes Kismet Happens

by nickelsleeve



Category: Day6 (Band), K-pop
Genre: AU, DoPil, Jaehyungparkian, Parkbros, Souls and stuff, possibly some dopil, supernatural shit happens, wow this actually has PLOT, zombies???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23651569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickelsleeve/pseuds/nickelsleeve
Summary: Jae could remember his death. Some of them couldn’t but Jae could. He’d died being struck by a campus bus and bled out right there on the pavement in front of his lecture hall. Of course once you die your soul has to go somewhere.
Relationships: Kang Younghyun | Young K/Park Jaehyung | Jae
Comments: 12
Kudos: 58





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has literally been in my drafts for over a year but hey quarantine so now there's time to write! Idk what to call this other than I had like a dream about it I think?

The line between heaven and hell had never been thinner. Or at least, Jae thought as he tossed the soul into his jar and frowned at it, that would be a good line to say.

The soul glimmered weakly in the jar--it wasn’t a particularly good soul but it wasn’t tainted yet and Jae needed to finish his assignment regardless of the mediocrity of the soul. Some souls didn’t like being captured but this one just hung suspended in the jar emitting a dull ehhhhhhh sound which pretty much summed it up.

Jae shook his head and pocketed the jar with a sigh. His stomach was grumbling and he was pretty sure he didn’t have any food back at his apartment.

Jae could remember his death. Some of them couldn’t but Jae could. He’d died being struck by a campus bus and bled out right there on the pavement in front of his lecture hall. Of course once you die your soul has to go somewhere.

Some souls though had trouble leaving their earthly bodies behind. And that wasn’t good. A soul inhabiting a dead shell was ripe for corruption. And the guys Upstairs didn’t like that. So Soul Hunters collected the souls and sent them straight on up to heaven so that the humans didn’t have to deal with the quickly deteriorating psyche of a soul that was essentially puppeting their own corpse.

And Jae was one of the souls that wasn’t necessarily good enough for heaven but wasn’t bad enough for hell and so he was given a choice--he could hang out in purgatory for a few centuries (literally the MOST boring place Jae had ever seen in his life, the purgatory he was assigned to simulate the most boring BMV ever created) or he could basically earn his way into heaven by collecting the souls on Earth that had trouble departing their bodies. Do that for a century and bam, he was heaven bound.

So Jae had become a Soul Hunter. The problem being that Jae was, for all intents and purposes, dead. But the guys Upstairs had decided that they needed to humanize the Soul Hunters and so despite being dead and given a corporeal body so he could do his job (super-human strength and speed included), he also had a body that needed basic nourishment and occasionally needed to take a dump. He also felt pain, which was annoying considering his new fancy magic body pretty much healed instantly.

While he didn’t need as much food as a normal human, Jae hadn’t eaten in about 2 days and was now feeling the beginnings of hunger.

He stopped in to his favorite take-out Thai place and grabbed some noodles before heading back to his apartment courtesy of the guys Upstairs.

The apartment came furnished with lots of old florals and lace trim and quite frankly Jae didn’t really want to think about the previous owner of the apartment, even if he was technically, dead.

He took the jar with the soul out of his bag and placed it on a scanner on a desk and pressed send and a bright cylinder of light filled the desk area for a second and then the soul was gone. Technology and magic, Jae snorted.

He hunkered down on his couch and began slurping noodles while a sitcom played on the tv in the background. Only 93 more years of this job.

Jae’s phone dinged and he awoke groggily around 9am and looked at the message on the screen. With a groan he began his morning routine.

He made it to the shop by 10am which was pretty good in his opinion and he tried not to cringe at the annoying jingle that sounded as he opened the door.

Wonpil, the proprietor of the shop, smiled brilliantly at Jae as he entered. Jae wasn’t sure what Wonpil’s deal was. Obviously, he was dead just like Jae but he wasn’t a Soul Hunter. He was basically an arms dealer--an interesting choice for a guy who looked like a Disney prince with a penchant for the ugliest sweaters Jae had ever seen--dead or alive.

“Oh hey Jae!” Wonpil smiled even wider. “Need a refill?”

Jae approached the counter and looked down at the series of weapons and ammo that Wonpil had on display. There was again the mix of technology and magic--Upstairs loved that shit. Silver bullets blessed by priests and dipped in Holy water, a crossbow that contained bolts made out of some shimmering material, a few knives forged in volcanoes that also tracked the soul if you managed to hit them--honestly it was impressive, not that Jae would admit it.

He tended to lean more for small guns and pistols, favoring two 9mm Glocks that made him feel a little bit cooler. He eyed the silver bullets, they were testy things. If the soul wasn’t particularly evil or bad then for some reason they never seemed to hit on target.

“I got some new stuff in,” Wonpil said, after Jae hadn’t responded. “You want to check it out?”

Jae nodded and ran his hands across the glass top counters. The shop looked like a regular gun store but had been magicked so that normal humans didn’t really bother looking too closely at the store front and if they did wander in suddenly forgot that their stove was on at home and rushed out quickly.

Wonpil waved his hand and a panel on the wall appeared. He punched in some symbols, there was a flash of blue light and then the wall shimmered and shifted. Jae blinked a few times, his eyes adjusting and then the wall seemed to change with new stock and items appearing.

Wonpil lifted a box from the wall and turned back to Jae, sliding it across the counter towards him. Jae opened the box.

“Supposedly these contain some kind of poison that slows down the nasty one. Hurts them too. The base is still silver though,” Wonpil said, resting his chin in his hands with his elbows on the counter. He looked at Jae through long eyelashes. “No Holy water on these too so they don’t have a moral compass.”

The bullets inside were silver with a moving molten line of neon green shooting through it. Jae raised an eyebrow.

“Poison? What kind?”

“Couldn’t say, the guys at R&D came up with it.”

Jae considered this and lifted a bullet up to examine it more closely. Other than the line of neon slipping around the silver surface it looked normal. “How fast does it slow them down?”

The shop owner cocked his head to the side. “Depends on how strong they are. Your low level souls? Minutes. Your nasty evil ones? Hours? Maybe days.”

“Hm.”

“Go ahead,” Wonpil cooed, “give them a try.”

“Why not,” Jae said and scooped the box up and tossed it into his backpack.

He got a text message from the guys Upstairs indicating a soul that needed collecting. Level 6. Jae shrugged, a 6 was annoying but not necessarily dangerous. 

He followed the directions that lead him to an old broken down warehouse. He slipped under a fence that already had a hole in it and into the main building, sighing. These souls had zero imagination when it came to hiding places. 

The building was shadowed even in broad daylight--the result of a corrupt soul creating a sort of miasma. It stank too.

Jae wrinkled his nose and went room from room, not bothering to be quiet. He wanted to get the corpse out of hiding after all. After about 10 minutes with only scaring pigeons he decided that going around the building further was a waste of effort. 

He went back into the main hallway and walked near stairwell. Then he tipped his head back and shouted at the top of his lungs.

“HELLO? IS ANYONE HOME!?”

There was a burst of movement as he scared several birds that had been roosting out through the open windows. Then silence.

He frowned, normally loud noises would draw them out.

Then he heard it, the very faint shuffling sound of a corpse in rigor mortis trying to be mobile. With a sprint he ran towards the noise down the hallway to his left. He was gaining on it judging by the panicked sliding he heard getting louder.

Turning a corner he finally saw it. It had been dead for a while. The stench was palpable even from 50 feet back where Jae was. It looked almost normal--embalming really had come such a long way--but the puppetry was making it crack in places. The skin under it’s eyes was sagging and had a sallow yellow-green color. It’s neck was cocked at an odd angle and the pupils were constricted almost to a pinpoint. They glowed a sickly yellow when they caught sight of Jae running towards it.

“No,” it rasped. “Not yet. Not.”

It tried to move faster but it’s limbs weren’t cooperating.

Jae smiled. An easy catch then. He slowed to a fast walk and almost lazily pulled out his guns from the infinite space where he stored them with a wave of his hand causing them to materialize in his fingers.

He held the guns up and shot.

Only to hear the telltale click of an empty magazine. 

Fuck, he’d forgotten to refill it. Jae frowned, annoyed at himself for forgetting but no super bothered by it because honestly, that corpse was going nowhere fast.

With another wave of his hand the bullets materialized and Jae began switching out the magazines, never taking his eye off the corpse.

It was while he was doing this that Jae heard a large cracking noise, his feet gave out from under him and then the darkness swallowed him whole.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shout out to @jaewinies for beta-ing this so it's not a complete mess

Jae’s back slammed into the hard ground knocking the wind out of him and making him curse the guys Upstairs for the millionth time that he could still feel pain. He tried to roll out of the way of the debris that was falling on top of him but the fall still had him feeling dazed.

“Fuck,” he muttered, squinting his eyes in the darkness and willing his body to move as the dust settled around him.

With a groan, he managed to sit up and brush aside some of the debris that had fallen on him when the floor collapsed. In the shadowy light he could make out what looked to be an old basement area of the warehouse, but the dilapidated steps leading back upstairs certainly couldn’t hold his weight.

His phone rang.

“Jae?”

Jae groaned again, this time because of the mental pain. “Yeah Sungjin?”

“Forgot to let you know about that level 6 you’re going after--there’s something wrong with it.”

He gently pushed to his feet and began to survey the room looking to see if there was any other way back up. “Besides it being hella dead you mean?” Jae moved towards one of the doorways hoping to locate another staircase in a different part of the building.

“They’re all dead. No, this one seems to have...and...other hunters...maybe…”

Jae backed up into the room he had fallen, hoping to get the signal back to his phone. “Wait, repeat that. I lost you for a sec.”

Sungjin sighed heavily as though irritated with Jae. “If you would just listen the first time we--”

“I lost the signal. Currently in a basement,” Jae said, cutting him off. “I saw it. It’s been dead for a long time but it’s held together surprisingly well.”

There was a pause long enough that Jae pulled the phone away from his ear to see if he’d lost the signal completely. He hadn’t.

“Hello?”

“Jae,” Sungjin said solemnly. “You saw it right? What did it look like?”

“I don’t know, a normal guy I guess? Except dead. Something weird with the eyes though. They were yellow.”

“Ah.”

“Ah? Ah? What do you mean by that?”

Sungjin swallowed and Jae could practically hear him trying to come up with an excuse and failing. “Be careful. He was one of ours.”

Jae’s eyes shot up to the hole in the ceiling that he had fallen through and then back down to the phone in his hands. “One of ours? A hunter?!”

There was a pause again. “Yeah, he was a hunter.”

“How the fuck did he get his corpse if he’s a hunter? Was he a newbie or something?” Jae was practically yelling into the phone.

“No...it appears he has...stolen someone else’s corpse.”

Jae felt his heart stop beating. This was unheard of. Souls could only possess their own bodies. The soul had to be compatible with the body and it just didn’t work if it wasn’t  _ your  _ body. And this meant that if souls were able to puppet others--

“What happened to the original soul?”

Deafening silence.

“Sungjin, what happened to the original soul.”

“We don’t know.”

“What the FUCK dude!”

  
  
  


It took Jae about an hour after the phone call to find a way out of the basement. A lot of the floors above had collapsed in different places making it difficult to maneuver and the building itself was huge. He finally located a back staircase and made it up to the surface again. His back was throbbing.

He looked around the building but the dark cloud was gone which meant that the corpse had left too. It gave Jae too much time to think. 

A hunter that deviated and stole another corpse. It was too insane to even think of, not to mention the logistics. They were given bodies--modeled after their own of course--but this body wasn’t exactly real. And while it wasn’t  _ real _ Jae couldn’t vacate it willingly. 

The way Sungjin made it sound, it was as if the hunter had forcibly removed the original soul from the body it now possessed. But did it destroy the soul?

Jae didn’t think so. Souls were valuable. Destroying one just didn’t seem to make sense.

He stopped to look at his reflection in a cracked window and to brush the dust out of his hair before readjusting his glasses. A quick look down at his phone showed he had several other assignments. He decided to tackle a low level soul since this one had disappeared.

By the time Jae cornered the level 2, the pain and bruises from the fall had disappeared from his body--a perk of being given one by the guys Upstairs. It hadn’t taken him much time to locate this corpse. 

He again sighed at the stereotypical setting it had chosen--a cemetery--and wished just for once that these souls would at least try to be creative with where they were hiding. Couldn’t one have been lurking around a Saks 5th Avenue sometime?  _ That  _ would be exciting.

It was rambling around in the midday light back in a rather scraggly copse of trees in the cemetery and it hadn’t been dead for long judging by the relatively decent condition of the corpse. Everything looked held together in a powdery, been-embalmed kind of way.

The poor thing just turned and looked at him, barely beginning to move before Jae had whipped out his gun and shot it square through the chest. The body dropped and a ball of light blinked in its place.

He pulled out a jar and gently captured the soul before placing it back into his backpack. Then he texted Sungjin to send a clean-up crew to find the grave that belonged to the corpse and place it back just in case anyone ever wanted to check back up on it.

“Um.”

For all his supposed training and years on this job and dealing with corpses that had essentially reanimated, Jae was pretty ashamed at how bad the voice from behind him made him jump.

Whirling around, Jae turned to see the source of the voice.

He was about Jae’s age--well the age Jae had been when he died--and not quite as tall. His dark hair was just a tad too long and sat in his eyes. But those eyes were wide open. As were his mouth.

Jae blinked for a moment not sure what to do. “Fuck,” he sighed.

“What--what the fuck was--what?” he other boy said, his mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Squinting, Jae waited to see what he would do. Unfortunately, the answer seemed to be a resounding nothing. They both just stared at each other. Jae wished that he had something that could erase memory but sadly that was something above his pay grade.

With a sigh, Jae pulled out his cellphone and began scrolling through his contact list until he found Sungjin’s name. 

Sungjin picked up after two rings. His voice was irritable. “What?”

Jae was about to explain to him that he had a witness but his phone call suddenly seemed to spur the other boy into action and within seconds Jae was tackled to the ground, the phone wrestled out of his grip.

“Nothing!” the other boy shouted into the phone before hanging up and chucking it away from where they lay in the grass.

Honestly, Jae was a little annoyed. He was  _ good _ at his job and collecting souls wasn’t easy. And yet this guy had just shoved him to the ground. And he was still in a state of--of something--and hadn’t moved to throw the guy off him. In fact he just kind of allowed the dark haired boy to kneel on him?

Jae squinted. He kind of looked familiar.

The other boy peered down at Jae with wild eyes, his face still a mix between shock and panic. Both of them were breathing hard.

“Jae?” the dark haired boy finally said, stretching out the name into two syllables.

_ Fuck. _

_ Double fuck.  _

  
“Brian,” Jae replied, silently just accepting that one--he had been caught doing something that shouldn’t make sense to any mortal and two--he had  _ of course _ been caught by someone who knew him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow look a chapter?????? will i actually continue????? maybe?????


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jae meets Brian.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to @Jaewinies for being my faithful beta

It didn’t make any sense. That Brian -- someone he knew -- was here. It also didn’t make any sense that Brian wasn’t little Brian anymore. But it had been 7 years.

The last time Jae had seen him was right before he had gone away to college. Brian had been his neighbor and tagged around quite a bit. Jae’s friends had always found it annoying -- Brian had been younger by a good 4-5 years -- but it never bothered Jae and he found Brian surprisingly funny.    
  


He must have been 13 years old last time Jae saw him the summer before he’d left. He was still short and a bit round in the face at that time. Jae remembered because it was something his friends often teased Brian about. But now ... how much time had passed? 

This Brian, the one perched on top of him, had to be in his twenties by now. He’d grown into his face and had a growth spurt and was sitting very solidly on top of Jae. Apparently he’d bulked up too.

“Fuck,” Jae said with a groan, rolling to the side and forcing Brian to get off of him. “You weigh a ton.”

Brian just stared, sitting cross legged in the grass. “You just ... you killed? You--”

He was back to looking like a fish with his mouth opening and closing and words sporadically coming out of his mouth. Jae ignored him and got to his feet trying to retrieve his phone. It had hit a tombstone hard and cracked. He thumbed at the screen. It didn’t turn on.

With a sigh, Jae turned back to Brian, unsure of how to proceed since he couldn’t call in the usual clean up team to do some mortal brain rearranging. 

Brian’s mouth snapped shut with an audible crack, and he squinted back, wonderfully silent for about half a second.

And then just like that, the silence was gone and Jae was tackled to the ground once again. Only this time Brian was kneeling next to him and seemed to be taking his pulse.

“You’re ...”

_ Ah,  _ thought Jae,  _ here it comes _ .

“... alive?”

“Yup.”

“I went to your funeral.”

“Yup.”

“But you’re ... alive.”

“Now you’re just repeating yourself.”

Brian slid back into the grass heavily. “What the  _ fuck _ .”

Jae sat up again, looking at Brian who appeared to be deep in thought with his eyes scrunched tightly shut. “About me or about what you saw?”

“Both,” Brian replied, his eyes boring into Jae’s. “If you’re not dead, where have you been? Why was there a funeral? Are you in the FBI? What was that-- that  _ thing _ ? Was it a zombie? Are you part of a secret government organization that protects us from genetically altered soldiers? What was that glowing thing? What--”

Pressing a finger to Brian’s lips to stop the word vomit, Jae cut him off. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

Brian nodded solemnly and Jae thanked his lucky stars that adult Brian seemed to be just as gullible as the Brian he remembered. He got to his feet and began walking away swiftly, hoping that the shock would keep Brian from following because quite frankly he wasn’t sure what to do with this mess. 

His hopes were dashed when he heard the telltale footsteps coming up behind him and Brian matched his stride next to him. “What are you doing now?”

Jae rolled his eyes. “I’m going home.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


It had been a lot harder to shake Brian than he anticipated and it was only after swearing to meet up at the cemetery the following day did Jae get Brian to stop following him. He felt almost guilty knowing that he wasn’t going to meet up with Brian and that most likely as soon as Jae got ahold of Sungjin again, Brian would have his brains scrambled by one of the Adjusters.

But first he needed a new phone and there was only one place to get the kind of phone he required.

Wonpil was in the shop even though by now it was evening. In fact, it was hard to determine if Wonpil ever did leave the shop. Considering the logistics and the fact that literally nothing Jae did followed the laws of physics it wasn’t impossible that Wonpil legitimately never left the shop.

“Oh, you’re back!” Wonpil’s smile was bright as usual, forcing his eyes into half-moon circles. “Did you need something?” 

Jae leaned heavily on the counter. “Yeah, you got a phone I can have?”

Wonpil had been busy working on something mechanical and spread out across the counter, his elegant fingers moving swiftly, but they froze when Jae asked his question. He cocked his head to the side. “You need a new phone?”

Jae sighed. He understood Wonpil’s hesitation. Soul Hunters didn’t generally just lose their phones. That was how they talked to the guys Upstairs, how they got info on potential souls that needed collecting--it was an essential part of the job. Losing a phone wasn’t necessarily rare, just not great. And Jae had even gone back to the cemetery to find his phone. It had apparently hit a headstone and shattered.

You’d think that the guys Upstairs could’ve built a better phone. 

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, last one got busted.”

Wonpil glanced at him, something flashing in his eyes for just a millisecond. He walked towards the back wall and pulled out another phone, handing it to Jae. He smiled again but this smile had something else in it.

Taking the phone, Jae put it in his pocket and headed towards the door. He stopped for a moment and turned back to Wonpil. “Hey, have you ever heard about a hunter’s soul needing to be collected?”

There was a clatter of metal as Wonpil dropped the parts he had started working on. His hands started to shake and his answer was above a whisper. “Isn’t that impossible?”

Jae shook his head. Nothing was impossible anymore.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He had long since put Brian to the back of his mind -- the very back, in a tiny closet that occasionally opened a crack and said things like “You’re alive?” It was annoying. Very annoying.

Maybe it was guilt for promising to meet up with Brian manifesting itself as a tiny Brian stuck in the back of his mind that said annoying things whenever Jae was trying to have a clear thought. Maybe it was the shock of being recognized pretty far from his hometown and in a city of millions. Maybe it was because Jae was actually going insane, as if the dead could do that. 

Either way the fake Brian was obnoxious.

Jae was currently in the middle of taking down a particularly feisty level 4. This one was anything but fresh, but was still managing to move quicker than expected even with the effects of rigor-mortis and embalming. And it had some bad juju too, Jae thought.

The corpse was that of a middle aged woman, dressed in a floral dress that had long gone out of style. But there was something just  _ not right _ with the corpse. It moved too fast, it seemed to anticipate what he was going to do.

And silver bullets were again refusing to take the shot.

Jae dodged to the left as the soul came at him, her fingernails long and sharp around the shrunken skin of her fingers, grazing his cheek. It stung.

There was some sort of darkness surrounding the corpse, the scratches on his cheek burning more than any sort of minor cut had a right to. 

He kicked out with his leg, intending to send her flying back and giving him enough time to retrieve another weapon since apparently the holy water didn’t find her evil enough to kill. But she latched onto his leg, biting down hard enough that Jae flailed with his arms.

With a twist he rolled to the side and kicked with his free leg, detaching her from him. As she scrambled to right herself, he grabbed the nearest item to him -- a brick -- and sent it crashing down on her skull. An awful screech left her as the body ceased movement. And then there was a tiny light.

This soul that popped out faded in and out, blinking like a lightbulb about to go out completely. It’s coloring was off too, sickly and yellow as though it was infected.

Jae snatched a jar and swiftly captured the soul inside. He watched it blink for a moment before getting out his phone and letting Sungjin know what had happened.

He brought his hand to his face, it was sticky and wet and still stung. When he brought his hand away it wasn’t blood that he had on his fingers. It was black and oily. 

Jae stared.

“There you are,” said a voice full of annoyance. “I’ve been looking for you every ... where ...”

Jae tried to push that voice back to the closet in the back of his mind but unfortunately it didn’t go anywhere.

“What ... what ...”

Squeezing his eyes shut and quickly wiping the black substance on the insides of his jean pockets, Jae turned. He opened his eyes back up.

Of course it was Brian. 

How he had found Jae in the middle of an abandoned building at 2 in the morning? If he wasn’t so certain that Brian was alive, he would’ve thought that maybe Brian had some of his own magic.

He raised an eyebrow before frowning. His voice gruff. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Well yeah, I know, the sign said no trespassing, I think it’s a condemned property so--”

Jae cut him off with a shake of his head and his voice sharp. “No. You shouldn’t be here at all. You shouldn’t have been following me. You need to leave. Now.” He was gathering his things that he’d dropped, including the jar with the soul, placing it in his bag. 

Brian seemed to be following him around again, like a lost puppy. “Why? Are the cops gonna be here? I can give them a report--”

Jae whirled around and stepped into Brian’s personal space. Brian had grown a lot taller since Jae had last seen him, but he was still short enough that Jae had to look down to see into his eyes in the dim light.

“Leave. Now,” he said, hoping that his voice contained that authoritative timbre that Sungjin always seemed to have. 

Brian blinked rapidly several times. “Why?”

Jae growled low and under his breath. “Leave!”

“I mean, I would if I could,” Brian said easily. He pointed to the area just beyond Jae where the stairs leading up to the second floor had been. “It’s just that ... the stairs disappeared.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates might be long and in between...I go back to work next week and will be starting grad school as well. I'm sorry ;;;;;;

**Author's Note:**

> Will I continue this???? Who knows?????


End file.
